Epox 4PCA3+ i875P Motherboard Review

When the news came down the wire that the Epox 4PCA3+ i875P motherboard was on the testing block I have to admit I was a little excited. You see, Epox are one of the few manufacturers that can make my techie pulse rise. This isn't because of any grand marketing schemes, promotions, or bundles of software and USB break-out boxes in the box. Nope, this impression is one which has been built over many months, and over experiences with many different motherboards from Epox. And if the past is any indication of what to expect in the future, then the 4PCA3+ has a lot to live up to. For not only are Epox motherboards typically fast, they are also typically very good overclockers; and as you may have realized, I'm all for hitting the high numbers! Now, onto more tangible points that you can actually take away and use as a guide in your path to choosing the right i875P motherboard. For starters, in the last several months I've noticed a broad trend cropping up in the motherboard industry. IDE headers are disappearing and being replaced by multitudes of Serial ATA headers. Typically they SATA component consists of just two headers, but now more often than not we find four SATA headers and just two 'legacy' IDE. I understand the future is in Serial ATA but I still have quite a few large capacity IDE drives that are far from being tossed out with yesterdays BX chipset. It's easy to see why a quiet grin swept across my face the second I saw not four, but six IDE headers on this motherboard. With the right sized hard drives one could make very nice use of the on board High Point HPT374 controller indeed.